PSA: Spent 4 hours on a miter joint that should have taken 20 minutes

Was building a custom picture frame for a client in Austin. Simple 45 degree miter joints, right? Except my miter saw was off by 1.2 degrees and I didnt check it. Kept getting gaps no matter how I adjusted. Finally broke out the digital angle finder and found the issue. Felt like a total idiot but hey, lesson learned. Anyone else had a tool mess with their head like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

jordan_hill7d ago

Hang on, hold up - @wells.christopher are you seriously saying a 1.2 degree error on a miter saw is character building? Man, I would've been throwing things across the shop after four hours of fighting that gap. There's a big difference between learning from a mistake and just burning a whole afternoon on a dumb calibration issue you couldve fixed in two minutes with a digital gauge.

wells.christopher7d ago

Well honestly I've always found those kinds of mistakes build character and make you a better woodworker in the long run.

abby_cooper7d ago

Nah I gotta disagree hard on this one lol. A mistake that ruins a nice piece of wood isn't building character, it's just wasting time and materials. You can learn the same lessons from watching someone else mess up or reading about it online these days. Spending hours fixing a dumb error doesn't make you a better woodworker, it just teaches you to be more careful which isn't the same thing at all. There's way too much expensive lumber out there to just write off mistakes as "character building" every time.